Buying lectrickery in the U.S. - bit OT ...

Not an expert here, but individual states regulate electric rates through rate commissions. Usually rate increases go through without too much problem - the companies just ask for more knowing they will get somewhat less. There are some incentives here and there, but no, you can't get pricing based on any competition. Not aware of tariffs as such. Producers in one state can and do sell to other states to the detriment of local customers. For example, California buys a lot of electricity from Arizona.

Mark Z.

That depends on where you live.

In Memphis, Tennessee, the city handles water (including sewer), gas, and electricity.

In other areas, you may have a different supplier for each.

Various pats of the state of Georgia get electricity from Georgia Power Company, others from a number of smaller companies and membership co-ops. Rates for various electricity providers in Georgia are here:

Natural gas is provided by numerous suppliers. Some have small service aeas, others serve large numbers of customers. Priceing charts are here:

Other states typically have some type of public service board or commission that regulates the utilities in the state. Those regulating officials usually publish some type of pricing information about the providers in the state.

d r

When the meters were read once a month, no time of day pricing was possible. Now, some places have off-peak and prime time pricing. "Smart meters" are being rolled out now to make this possible. Where my uncle lives, you can get a cheaper summer rate if you let the utility turn off your air conditioning for some fraction of every hour at peak times.

In my area, the pricing is tiered. A certain amount of kWh is sold at the lowest rate, the next amount at a higher rate, and a third at an even higher rate. There's no bill in the "to be paid" box so I don't know what the figures are.

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Historically, suppliers were local, generating power and distributing it. Some operations merely distributed power. A city near me has its own power distribution system, although one utility supplies most of the area.

"Deregulation" separated power generators from power distributors. The promise was that competition from generators would drive the price down. In reality companies like Enron and Reliant gamed the system to drive prices up, creating fake brownouts and blackouts by shutting power plants down for "maintenance."

The separation was only partially successful, because no one wanted to buy the nuclear power plants. This was a boon during deregulation, because nuclear was the cheapest source of power.

Depends on where you live. Some gas suppliers decided to get into the electric business, although the Edison trust operated in many cities as competition.

"Arfa Daily trolling as Usual "

** Makes things simpler having one supplier. ** Rates cannot change in the short term unless premises have high tech energy meters.

Most here still have old style, analogue meters with mechanical dials.

Gas is 2.5 cents per megajoule and electricity is 21 cents per kWh.

A kWh = 3.6 megajoules.

.... Phil

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50 years ago in New Jersey we had an off-peak hot water heater on a separate meter.. Trouble was that there was an ordinary clock inside the meter that was used to tell the time of day and set the off-peak timing.. It was wrong from the day we moved in due to numerous power failures, and frequently we got our hot water heated during peak hours. Apparently they did not trust the meter readers to take of the meter seal and reset the internal clock, because in 5 years it was never reset by the power company.

Where I live now in suburban Chicago - Naperville, we are getting smart meters. But there is a group of about 10% of the residents who are opposed to the meters. Either they fear the radiation from the meters - electrophobia - or they don't want the government to know they are using many kilowatts of power at 3 am for their marijuana plants grow lamps in their basements.

That sounds similar to a question that was once posed to me by someone in Malta: "What's the weather like in the U.S.?"

Malta being smaller that a number of U.S. _cities_, and Great Britain being smaller than most of the U.S. states.

I have a friend who is an expert in BPL (broadband over power lines) and he says that while it works, it's no longer viable as a business selling internet access because in the real world it could never produce the speeds that people want and get from other methods.

HOWEVER it works fine for "smart" meters, and the bandwidth they need is so low it does not interfere with radios.

My guess is that the people running large grow lights in their basement are more upset that they can't turn the meters upside down and have them run backwards or bypass the meter than anything else.

It's an old trick that works on old meters, and in some places the meter readers did not look very carefully at the seals to see they had been broken and put back.

Since no one actually has to stand in front of the meters to read them now, they can be placed where it is difficult or almost impossible to tamper with them. :-)

Geoff.

--
Geoffrey S. Mendelson,  N3OWJ/4X1GM/KBUH7245/KBUW5379
To put it in terms everyone understands, the US debt is over 150 Facebooks.

I am a BIG anti establishmentist and as such I would love to steal ANY utility I can. Personally, you can trust me with your life, but if you got an "inc." you better keep your eyes open.

I remember a Father/son project (not me). They ran an electric whole house furnace on high through a rectifier to try to magnetize the poles inside the mechanical meter. Those things are on the way out. We also discussed that guy who layed long lines on his own property parallel to the over head high tension wires. The government's contention was that the power he used showed up on a meter somewhere, but if you know transformer theory you know that is not true.

For example power flows through a wire more efficiently in conduit because it quenches part of the magnetic field generated. Of course this is miniscule, but still true. Well that wire on the ground was actuing as the secondary of a transformer, as such when current was pulled from that wire, it increased the efficiency of the power company's transmission wire. The point of law was not that someone else was paying for it, the problem was that he wasn't. Plain and simple. You know in some states it is now illegal to collect rainwater on your own property here in the land of the fee and the home of the slave. It is certainly illegal to collect electromagnetic energy. I think the people who made it that way should be boiled in oil for higher treason, but that is beyond the scope of this thread of course.

Anyway, many years ago one power company came out with peak load meters. It had the wheel and the dials, but it also had an ammeter. The ammeter had a peak recorder, mechanical of course. It had two needles that indicated usage. One went up and down, the other went up and did not come down. When the meter reader came he had a key that would reset the one needle. He recorded that peak reading and the higher the needle was stuck on the scale, the more you paid per unit, ALL MONTH.

Mechanical meters are on their way out. They just changed them on my house. Now I am sure that I could flip one upside down, but being digital I am almost positive that it can detect that. Whether it has a way to report that I do not know. But the event would certainly be recorded in the meter. Maybe there will be a rash of "meter thefts". If an engineer designed a KWH meter without this capability they would certainly be fired. If I were the power company I would fire them.

Really though, on an old mechanical meter, remember that you can sell power back, at least in theory. In fact some people do, although there is a push now for the government to say it literally owns the sunshine that falls on your property here. If you do sell it back, the meter I think has to run backward, but there is still power on their side. In case of a power outage, if you sell back ALOT of power and they come and don't see any solar or wind devices, they are going to want to know where that power came from. What do you say, even if you did get away with flipping the meter ? Generally, the best you can do is generate enough, more thasn enough for yourself and have NO usage whatsoever. In fact at Pearl and Fulton you can rent a business storefront with free electricity, because it is in fron of a boneyard that has a windmill. I bet though, that if I wanted to start a foundry and machine shop there, the rent would be a bit higher.

They got you coming and going.

Soon, in this country they are going to require a license just to recieve money. Mark my words. And do not start that tinfoil shit, I can back all this up.

J

By the kw-hr. Rates vary by time of day, state, season, type of service (residential, industrial, and commercial) and regulatory gouging. There are local government owned utilizes (such as Los Angeles Dept of Water and Power), independent investor owned utilities (such as PG&E and Cal Edison), and power cooperatives, which buy bulk kw-hrs, and resell the power to its members.

To keep it all looking sane, the federal government produces reports on the cost of power that is intended to remind the power consumers of their position in life.

The May 2012 report. Note that the cost per kw-hr seems to be missing:

However, the new and improved data browser has it:

In general, it's the same price all day. The exception are a few large industrial plants and commercial buildings that have time-of-use billing. The basic idea is to reduce energy use during peaks.

With normal billing, it's fairly simple. Consumer electricity is divided into tiers. The low usage tiers are fairly economical. However, if usage increases to tier 5, it can get really expensive. The regular billing schedule:

The Time-of-Use version:

Usually, it's from the local regulated monopoly. In my area, it's PG&E. However, you can buy from a wide variety of independents. The electricity is delivered by PG&E, produced by some alternative producer, and is billed through some other entity. This usually costs more than PG&E, but allegedly gives the consumer that warm fuzzy feeling from buying clean energy from an ecologically correct vendor.

In general, local. However, many producers are large enough that they server half of the state.

No confusion here. The state divides up the pie according to which electricity producer and operator can do the best job for the state. A few years ago, they stupidly demanded that the major delivery and billing companies, divest themselves of all of their production facilities. It was suppose to result in lower prices, but instead managed to raise them. It's not as neat as I would like, but it works.

It varies too much by tier and season to offer a single value. See:

Somewhere between $0.11 to $0.34/kw-hr.

--
Jeff Liebermann     jeffl@cruzio.com
150 Felker St #D    http://www.LearnByDestroying.com
Santa Cruz CA 95060 http://802.11junk.com
Skype: JeffLiebermann     AE6KS    831-336-2558

"Arfa Daily" wrote in news:yXSzr.2185$ snipped-for-privacy@fx31.am:

in central Florida,Progress Energy,I have a standard KWH rate,and then a higher rate for consumption over 1000 KWH. I never get anywhere near that. I have no choice as to what utility provides my electricity,it's a monopoly.

there's also a fuel charge,for the first 1000 KWH,and an increased rate for every 1000 KWH over that.

energy charge= 6.275c/KWH 1st 1000 KWH. 7.366c/KWH over 1000 KWH

fuel charge= 4.86c/KWH 5.86c/KWH over 1000 KWH. then there's the taxes and special fees for this and that.

--
Jim Yanik
jyanik
at
localnet
dot com

"Geoffrey S. Mendelson" wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@cable.mendelson.com:

those MaryJane grow operations are often caught by the huge amount of electric power they consume,the utility company turns them in to authorities. Power companies track usage and keep a history of a home's consumption over the years and easily spot large increases in power consumption.My utility prints out on my bill the usage by month of the last year,a nice little bargraph. Plus,the growers often bypass the meters to not show up by their overuse,or they run a line over to the nearest power pole or house next door and steal power from them.

the police were trying to use thermal cameras to scan neighborhoods from airplanes(drones??) but the courts nixed that as an invasion of privacy.

--
Jim Yanik
jyanik
at
localnet
dot com

Similar situation here. We have an energy cost and a delivery cost plus baseline fees/taxes. Gives 'em more ways to raise rates.

We also have the option to pay MORE for green energy. Near as I can tell, they put your payment in the green bucket long enough to get some energy tax incentives and a photo-op, then the excess sloshes out into the executive bonus bucket.

We also have a time-of-use option. You get to pay an additional fee for the option to pay MORE for peak use and less for off-peak. I don't have the glossy brochure handy, but last time I did the math, my break-even point was switching 80% of my use to 4AM.

The time of use option solution is obvious. Switch EVERYBODY to time of use. Keep the peak rate the same and lower the off-peak rate. You can raise ALL the rates later, when nobody's looking. EVERYBODY has the incentive to smooth out the load peaks and valleys. EVERYBODY wins...well, there'd be less in the bonus bucket. And all those people marching down main street in opposition to that wind farm or transmission line could bring along their electric bill to demonstrate that they're washing their clothes at 4AM and cutting their total use below norm to eliminate the need for that new energy source.

f

Reminds me of some 40 years ago, after the first Arab oil shock (the Sheik Shock? When OPEC first flexed its muscles.)

All consumers/producers of energy were trying to be more efficient. Electric companies were looking at a thing called "pumped storage."

During the wee hours, water would be pumped uphill. During the hot afternoons, water would be let go downhill, spinning hydroelectric turbines as it went.

Sounded like a treadmill to oblivion, but it effectively shifted excess capacity from the middle of the night to when it was needed.

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That's still in use in some parts of Colorado.

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Now that I am an Instant Google Expert: You have to compare pumped storage to the other possible solutions: bigger base load power plants which generate excess electricity all the time, or peaker plants which take a while to put on line. Pumped storage plants can start producing electricity within two minutes, and can operate at full power within

30 minutes, according to the wikipedia article about the Ludington, MI pumped storage station, which pumps Lake Michigan water up to the top of the dunes.

One comparative disadvantage of fossil-fueled peakers is that they take a while to deliver power in phase.

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Good so far. From what i have read it is not too difficult to store several hundred acre-feet of water elevated by several hundred feet in some locations. The mechanical efficiency of storing energy this way = runs in the vicinity of 85 percent. You easily get mgh energy storage from these figures.

?-)

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I wasn't talking about pumping water to store it. This water is just for the horses. Lenny